The Ringleader

How Grover Norquist keeps the conservative movement together.

For much of the twentieth century, Washington was a Democratic town. Presidents came and went, but on Capitol Hill, which is where the tax dollars get spent, liberals and moderates dominated the key committees and set the legislative agenda. Washington’s permanent establishment—the law firms, the lobbyists, the research institutes, the media—was also heavily Democratic. Even when Republicans took over, they tended to be consensus builders, like Howard Baker and Bob Dole, who rarely challenged the ruling ethos. Especially after Senator Barry Goldwater, of Arizona, made his disastrous bid for the Presidency, in 1964, conservative Republicans were regarded as oddballs. In 1974, when the American Conservative Union organized its first annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or cpac, it was able to muster just three co-sponsors: an organization called Young Americans for Freedom and the magazines National Review and Human Events. “The movement was so small that I liken it to when Marx and Lenin were in exile,” David Keene, the president of the American Conservative Union, said to me recently.

Gradually, the political climate changed. An important moment came in 1979, when Ronald Reagan embraced the religious right, something that Goldwater had always declined to do—social conservatives like Jerry Falwell deserved “a swift kick in the ass,” he once commented. Since then, conservatives have taken control of much of the federal government, and they have also created their own research institutes, lobbying firms, networking organizations, and media outlets. This year’s cpac, at which Vice-President Dick Cheney was one of the speakers, had more than ninety co-sponsors.

Grover G. Norquist, a former young Reaganite whom Newt Gingrich, the House Speaker from 1995 to 1998, described to me as “the single most effective conservative activist in the country,” has helped bring about this transformation. For all its success, the right is an often fractious alliance of evangelical Christians, laissez-faire liberals, neoconservatives, corporate conservatives, and many other sects and sub-sects. Norquist plays a key role in keeping the coalition together, acting, by turns, as ringleader, visionary, and enforcer. “It’s very unusual to have a leader in the conservative movement who can unite everybody,” Charles Black, a veteran Republican strategist, says. “Grover’s got a way of convincing people that they are important and that what they are doing is significant.” Norquist has some critics on the right—the pundit Tucker Carlson once called him “a mean-spirited, humorless, dishonest little creep”—but his ability to marshal disparate groups has earned him access to the highest levels of power. “There’s nobody like Grover,” Ralph Z. Hallow, a political reporter for the Washington Times, says. “He’s close to the White House. That means Karl”—the Presidential adviser Karl Rove. “He’s well liked on the Hill. And he’s also trusted by the movement.”

Norquist has never held an elected office, but, since taking over the advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform, in 1985, he has persuaded countless Republican politicians into signing a pledge not to raise taxes under any circumstances, among them two hundred and twenty-two congressmen and forty-six senators. Norquist’s advocacy extends to other conservative goals, such as free trade and reform of the labor laws. Last summer, when I met with him for the first time, he said that his ultimate aim is to halve the size of the government relative to the size of the economy and to undo several decades of liberal policy, and, he added, “it’s doable.”

Norquist, at forty-eight, is squat, bearded, and bespectacled. He has pale-blue eyes and reddish-brown hair that lies flat on his square head. Contrary to Carlson’s opinion, he does possess a sense of humor, but it doesn’t detract from his monomaniacal passion for politics. As we talked in his cluttered office, near the corner of Twentieth and L Streets, in downtown Washington, he paced back and forth, opening and closing his briefcase, rearranging books on his shelves, moving pens and papers around on his desk, and, finally, bending down to pick up bits of dust. As long as George W. Bush was in the White House and the Republicans controlled Congress, he assured me, every year would bring a new tax cut and further conservative legislation. “That is how the Democrats built the New Deal and the Great Society,” Norquist said. “Every year more spending, every year more programs.”

Last November, when President Bush was reëlected and the Republicans regained control of the Senate, Norquist’s prediction of an emerging conservative hegemony seemed accurate. There appeared to be little to prevent the President from transforming Social Security, opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling, and making permanent the tax cuts he introduced in his first term. In recent months, however, something surprising has happened: the forgotten center of American politics has reasserted itself. Dozens of Republican congressmen have defied the President to support the expansion of embryonic-stem-cell research; seven Republican senators have joined with seven Democrats to preserve the judicial filibuster; the President’s proposals for Social Security have faltered as the Democrats have seized on the issue; and the White House and social conservatives squabbled, to begin with, anyway, over who should replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court.

Norquist, too, has suffered some reverses. On Capitol Hill, his economic agenda has been stalled, and in many parts of the country Republican governors and legislators have ignored his dictates and raised taxes. What’s more, he has been dragged into the corruption scandal surrounding Tom DeLay, the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, and Jack Abramoff, the disgraced Republican lobbyist who paid the airfare for DeLay’s now notorious golfing trip to Scotland in September, 2000. Norquist is an old friend and political ally of Abramoff’s, and they have worked together on a number of political issues. Democrats have seized on their connection to try and discredit Norquist. “Ten years ago, Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff set out to change the Republican Party,” Karen Finney, the communications director of the Democratic National Committee, said to me last week. “Their dealings in this town are representative of a culture of corruption and abuse of power.”

On Wednesday mornings, Norquist hosts an off-the-record gathering of conservative activists that has evolved into a wide-ranging forum for members of Congress, Capitol Hill staffers, single-issue campaigners, journalists, policy wonks, and corporate lobbyists. Karl Rove shows up every few months, and other Administration officials attend on a regular basis. The “Wednesday meeting,” as it is known, has become so popular that Norquist’s friend John Fund, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal, has christened him the Grand Central Station of conservatism.

The meeting starts at ten o’clock sharp and finishes sometime between eleven-thirty and twelve, depending on the agenda. Norquist sits at a big oval wooden table with about twenty regulars. The rest of the crowd gathers along the sides of the room, where there is seating for about a hundred. Often, people have to stand. One day this spring, Norquist opened the meeting by talking about his ongoing fight to persuade Mitch Daniels, a former White House budget director who is now the governor of Indiana, not to raise taxes. “Our dear friend Mitch Daniels had his brain temporarily kidnapped by North Koreans, but we are now winning the battle,” Norquist said. “Fortunately, Mitch has reversed his policy, adopted our position, and proclaimed it as his own.”

Norquist loves to declaim. He refers to Democrats as “the enemy”; he has described bipartisanship as “date rape”; and he likes to talk about reducing the federal government so much that he could “drown it in the bathtub.” For policymakers like Rove, he provides an invaluable link to the Republican Party’s conservative base, which is often suspicious of elected politicians and officeholders. For the activists who constitute that base, Norquist combines access to power with the aura of an outsider. “Grover came to Washington believing in and working for certain things, and, in spite of lures and blandishments from all sorts of people, he has stuck with what he believes,” Peggy Noonan, a former White House speechwriter, who has known Norquist for more than twenty years, wrote to me in a recent e-mail. “Others came to D.C. and became co-opted, subtly and comfortably, by the big murky muddle, which can offer so much: insiderism, big Administration jobs, celebration as a moderate by the MSM”—mainstream media. “None of that seemed to tempt Grover.”

The first guest speaker was Tim Goeglein, a thin, bow-tied White House official, who talked about the ongoing standoff on Capitol Hill, where Senate Democrats were blocking the approval of some Republican nominees, including half a dozen conservative judges and John Bolton, the ambassador-designate to the United Nations. Outraged Republicans were threatening to exercise the so-called “nuclear option” of abolishing the filibuster, which allows a minority of senators to defy the majority. During last year’s election, the Bush Administration intimated that it intended to remake the Supreme Court in a conservative image if, as was expected, Chief Justice Rehnquist and at least one other justice stepped down. Social conservatives, in particular, viewed the filibuster battle as the precursor to this long-awaited takeover of the high court, and Goeglein didn’t do anything to dampen their hopes. One way or another, Bolton and the judges would be approved, he said. And he added, “This may be the most successful judicial-coalition effort in modern Republican history. And it is largely because of people in this room, so thanks.”

Although Norquist’s own policy interests are primarily economic, he knows that social issues are the principal battleground for many conservatives, and he makes sure to invite representatives both from religious organizations like Focus on the Family and the Eagle Forum and from non-sectarian groups interested in social issues, such as the Federalist Society, an organization of conservative lawyers that works closely with the White House on judicial nominations. Norquist micromanages every aspect of the meeting, down to the type of coffee served. To keep things moving, he restricts each presenter to a couple of minutes. A member of his staff talked about the attempt to make the abolition of the estate tax permanent. Ed Bryant, a potential Senate candidate from Tennessee, extolled his conservative credentials, saying that he had signed Norquist’s tax pledge and committed himself to the judicial battle. A Republican staffer from the House of Representatives delivered an update on a new Social Security bill. “Keep an eye open for the V.A.T. guys,” Norquist said, referring to the value-added tax that many countries impose. “V.A.T. is a French word for big government.”

After about an hour, a woman named Stacie Rumenap, from the American Conservative Union, began to talk excitedly about an upcoming tribute dinner for Tom DeLay. Despite accusations that he put family members on his payroll and took overseas trips paid for, in part, by Abramoff, DeLay remains a hero to many conservatives. “We are at capacity—more than nine hundred people have bought tickets,” Rumenap said. “The reception starts at six o’clock, and the dinner will start at seven. We are expecting some protesters, but the D.C. police will be prepared to deal with them.” Another woman added, “It will be the usual freaks, so ignore them. The Democrats are in disarray. We are winning. We are going to get a vote on Bolton. We are going to get the judges. So just ignore them and enjoy yourselves.”

After the meeting, Norquist walked to the Palm, a steakhouse on Nineteenth Street, where he strategized about the “nuclear option” with David MacIntosh, a former Republican congressman from Indiana, who helped set up the Federalist Society. Over lunch, Norquist argued that the Republicans could end up benefitting even if the effort to end the filibuster failed initially. “Say we lose by forty-nine to fifty-one because moderates like Voinovich and Snowe”—George Voinovich, of Ohio, and Olympia Snowe, of Maine—“oppose it,” he said. “Then we try to appoint a conservative judge to the Supreme Court, and the Democrats beat us up on it for five months and piss off the public. Then we could go back and ask for another vote on the filibuster.”

Norquist grew up in Weston, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. His father, Warren, was a senior executive at Polaroid, a Methodist, and a moderate Republican. Grover says that he himself became interested in conservative politics when, at the age of thirteen, he picked up two anti-Communist books from his local library: “Masters of Deceit,” by J. Edgar Hoover, and “Witness,” by Whittaker Chambers. In those days, he wasn’t thinking of going into politics. After reading the autobiographies of Thomas Dewey and Lewis E. Lawes, a warden at Sing Sing, he wanted to become a prosecutor.

Norquist entered Harvard in 1974. He was basically a libertarian then, his classmate John Brady, who is now a successful businessman, told me. Brady met Norquist at a gathering of the College Republicans, whose national chairman at the time was Karl Rove, but he recalls that Norquist was more interested in journalism than in student politics. After working at the Advocate and at the Crimson, Norquist became involved with the Harvard Chronicle, the in-house journal of the Harvard Libertarian Association.

In 1978, after graduating with a major in economics, Norquist moved to Washington and went to work for the National Taxpayers Union, where his energy and his meticulousness got him rapidly promoted to executive director. After a year, he returned to Cambridge, at the behest of his father, to attend Harvard Business School. By then, though, he had decided to pursue a career in politics. While working on Ronald Reagan’s Presidential campaign, he met Jack Abramoff, a student at Brandeis. The unlikely pair—a Wasp libertarian and a Jewish Reaganite—became close friends. In early 1981, Norquist, using his dorm room as an office, ran Abramoff’s bid to become chairman of the College Republicans. Abramoff was elected, and he appointed Norquist executive director, which gave him the opportunity to return to Washington.

He never left. After six months with Abramoff, he took a job directing Americans for the Reagan Agenda, an advocacy group that the White House had set up. The Democrats could still exert considerable influence on the Hill, and even some Republicans were deeply suspicious of Reagan’s tax-cutting program. Young radicals like Norquist were regarded as “crazies” and “revolutionaries,” in part because of their backing for anti-Communist groups abroad. Norquist went to Pakistan to express his support for the Afghan mujahideen, to Mozambique, and to Angola, where he grew a beard and spent time with the guerrilla group unita, although he didn’t see much action.

In 1985, Donald Regan, Reagan’s chief of staff, chose Norquist to head Americans for Tax Reform, another advocacy group that the Administration was setting up, this time to lobby for a radical overhaul of the tax code. Norquist was only twenty-nine, and he quickly learned that generating public support for any sort of major change is difficult. “I discovered there was no public interest in fundamental tax reform,” he said. “We offered to pay for the public to send telegrams to congressmen demanding reform, but almost nobody sent one. People wouldn’t even send a free letter.”

Despite this discouraging start, Congress passed the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which reduced the top income-tax rate from fifty per cent to twenty-eight per cent. Still, the Reaganites feared that Congress would allow tax rates to creep back up, and Norquist got the idea of persuading members of the House and Senate to sign a pledge never to raise taxes. He wrote the pledge himself, in simple declarative sentences:

I, ________, pledge to the taxpayers of the _______district of the State of ________ and to the American People that I will:ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses; andTWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.Signed ______________

In a political system that was constructed on the Burkean notion that elected officials are deliberators rather than mere delegates, Norquist’s pledge didn’t please everybody, but its impact has been persistent and dramatic. “Politicians always promise people everything,” David Keene said. “By saying, ‘O.K., sign this,’ it gives a degree of accountability.”

President George H. W. Bush, who had signed Norquist’s pledge during the 1988 election campaign, paid a high price in the 1992 election for breaking his promise, much to Norquist’s delight. “Had Bush been able to win in 1992, it would have made the pledge meaningless,” Norquist says. “Bush had a pretty good Presidency. He ended the Cold War peacefully. He kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. But he broke his commitment to the American people. Then he gets thrown out of office by a bum—a nobody from Arkansas. The message was: You can’t break the pledge.”

Norquist’s theory of American politics is disarmingly simple: liberals want something from the government; conservatives want the government to leave them alone. During the Roosevelt-Kennedy-Johnson era, he says, the Democratic Party prospered because it delivered things its constituents demanded: stronger labor laws for union members; retirement benefits for seniors; and affirmative-action programs for minorities. The reason the Republicans have replaced the Democrats as the ruling party is that they cater to popular distaste for the federal government.

“The guy who wants to be left alone to practice his faith, the guy who wants to make money, the guy who wants to spend money without paying taxes, the guy who wants to fondle his gun—they all have a lot in common,” Norquist said one day this spring in a taxi going from George Bush International Airport, in Houston, to the George R. Brown Convention Center, where the National Rifle Association was holding its annual convention. “They all want the government to go away. That is what holds together the conservative movement.”

Norquist regards gun owners as a crucial element of his “leave us alone” coalition, and since 2000 he has been a director of the N.R.A. Attending the board meeting that was scheduled to take place after the convention was so important to him that he had delayed his honeymoon. At the start of April, he married Samah Alreyyes, a thirty-two-year-old public-affairs officer at the United States Agency for International Development. But, rather than depart for London, Paris, and the Seychelles immediately, he and his new wife chose to wait a couple of weeks.

Norquist got to Houston on a Sunday afternoon. During the first three days of the convention, more than sixty thousand people had attended a variety of parties and panel sessions, including one devoted to “God, Guns and Rock ’n’ Roll,” which was hosted by Ted Nugent. “To show you how radical I am, I want carjackers dead,” the aging rocker roared at the crowd between songs. “I want rapists dead. I want burglars dead. I want child molesters dead. No court case. No parole. No early release. I want ’em dead. Get a gun, and when they attack you shoot ’em.”

“Did you see Ted Nugent?” Wayne La Pierre, the N.R.A.’s chief executive, asked Norquist when he greeted him at a reception for board members. “It’s amazing—he really can play the guitar.” Norquist said that he had just arrived. “But I saw him play with Lynyrd Skynyrd last year,” he added. “He was great.”

A little later, a tough-looking man wearing a bootlace tie tapped Norquist on the shoulder and said, in a heavy Long Island accent, “Grover, when are you going to get it together and break George Pataki’s arm?” The speaker was John L. Cushman, a former marine from Patchogue, in Suffolk County, who had been campaigning in Albany to relax New York’s tough gun laws.

Norquist turned to Cushman and said, “Why, what’s up?”

“I finally got a bill through both houses, and Pataki vetoed it,” Cushman replied, with a sneer. “He said, ‘Oh, no, that’s an N.R.A. bill,’ and he vetoed it.”

Norquist looked surprised. He has a good relationship with Governor Pataki, who is considering a bid for the White House in 2008. A few days earlier, Pataki had called to reassure him that he had just cut some taxes. “Send me the particulars of the gun bill,” Norquist said to Cushman. “And I’ll get it to him.”

As part of his dream of creating a nationwide network of committed conservatives, Norquist has helped set up regular meetings of activists in more than forty states, including all the big ones. The following day, at the board meeting, he distributed leaflets encouraging gun owners to attend these local gatherings. Some of the N.R.A. officials seemed dubious. After the meeting broke up, Norquist ran into a fellow board member, Edie Reynolds, who mentioned that she was spending the summer in Vermont. “We have a good meeting up there, and you can go to it,” Norquist interjected. “O.K.,” Reynolds replied. “But I might find it a bit difficult to get away. I’ll be teaching young girls to shoot.”

Norquist didn’t seem discouraged. On the way back to Washington, he talked about how to build a broad coalition. “If you want the votes of people who are good on guns, good on taxes, and good on faith issues, that is a very small intersection of voters,” he said. “But if you say, Give me the votes of anybody who agrees with you on any of these issues, that’s a much bigger section of the population.” To illustrate what he meant, Norquist drew three intersecting circles on a piece of paper. In the first one he wrote “guns,” in the second he wrote “taxes,” in the third he wrote “faith.” There was a small area where the three circles intersected. “With that group, you can take over the country, if you start with the airports and the radio stations,” he said. “But with all of the three circles that’s sixty per cent of the population, and you can win politically. And if you add more things, like property rights and home-schooling, you can do even better.”

In 1993, with Bill Clinton in the White House, Newt Gingrich, a congressman from Georgia, was promoting himself as a conservative revolutionary. Gingrich had made his reputation attacking Jim Wright, the Democratic Speaker of the House, for ethical lapses, but his indictment of the Washington political system extended to his own party’s moderate leadership. For more than a decade, he had been meeting with a group of like-minded activists, Norquist included, every week on Capitol Hill, and expounding on the question Lenin posed: What is to be done? “It was the political equivalent of love at first sight,” Norquist recalled of those early days. “Newt walked into the room, and he wanted to do what I wanted to do. He wanted to build a movement to take over the House and the Senate, and he didn’t consider this nutty talk.”

Some commentators initially regarded Gingrich as a crank, but his idea of writing down a series of core objectives, such as term limits and welfare reform, in a “Contract with America,” proved popular with conservatives and voters. Norquist became an enthusiastic proponent of the contract, which he regarded as a logical extension of his tax pledge. On the night of the 1994 midterm elections, he flew to Atlanta, where he joined Gingrich’s victory party as exit polls showed that the Georgia congressman was set to succeed Tom Foley as Speaker of the House. After most of the revellers had gone home, Gingrich, Norquist, and about twenty others sat around and ate ice cream as they discussed their grand designs. “It wasn’t euphoric—it was strangely calm,” Norquist recalled. “It was, like, ‘We thought we could do this and we did it. What should we do next?’ ”

The standard history of the subsequent two years is that Gingrich over-reached and ended up setting back the conservative cause. Norquist has a different interpretation. Although Gingrich was ultimately forced to resign as Speaker, in 1998, his reforms achieved a great deal, Norquist insists, especially the introduction of six-year term limits for committee chairs in the House. “It was the equivalent of what Louis XVI did to the barons,” Norquist said. “It neutered people who used to have power. You can’t run a coherent and unified movement with thirteen independent power bases.” Once term limits were introduced, right-wing Republicans were able to banish the remaining moderates and take over. “The national power base for a governing conservative coalition in this country is the House,” Norquist said. “You can govern from the House.”

Although he is best known for his activities in Washington, Norquist spends about half of his time on local politics. Many states and cities are facing budget deficits, which, by law, have to be eliminated. Norquist refuses to accept this as a justification for tax hikes. The day after he returned from Texas, he met with some of his staff and discussed what was happening around the country. First, though, he dealt with a housekeeping matter, asking his receptionist, Kelsey Zahourek, how many cups of coffee had been drunk at the previous week’s Wednesday meeting.

“Eighty-three cups of coffee were consumed last week,” Zahourek replied.

“Are people taking notice of what I said about the size of the cups?” Norquist said.

“Yes,” Zahourek replied.

Another member of Norquist’s staff, Scott LaGanga, filled him in on recent developments in Montana, Indiana, and North Carolina. Norquist said that the biggest challenge was Virginia, where nineteen Republican legislators who supported a tax increase are up for reëlection this fall, and where he is trying to defeat some of them in the Republican primary. “We only need to win one or two races to send a message,” he said. “People say we need to win all of them, but that’s not right.”

Norquist doesn’t hesitate to attack fellow-Republicans. “When you have a brand like Coca-Cola, and you find a rat head in the bottle, you create an outcry,” he told me. “Republicans who raise taxes are rat heads in Coke bottles. They endanger the brand.” Another place on Norquist’s mind was Colorado, where Bill Owens, the Republican governor, was trying to relax limits on state spending. “He was a guy we trusted,” Norquist said. “The bad news is he’s getting a lot of corporate pukes to support him.”

After the meeting ended, Norquist returned a call from a reporter at the Christian Science Monitor and lit into Owens and several Republican tax-raisers, including Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, and Bob Riley, the governor of Alabama, making it clear that they would suffer for their apostasy. “The next Republican Presidential candidate will be a Republican governor who did not raise taxes,” Norquist said. “People who raise taxes—their aspirations for higher office have been destroyed. Mitch Daniels will never be anybody’s Vice-President. Bob Riley will never be President. Bill Owens, who I considered a Presidential contender, he will never be President. He slit his own throat.”

Another local politician who incurred Norquist’s wrath was Governor George W. Bush, of Texas, when, in 1997, he proposed new sales taxes and fees to make up some of the revenue that would be lost under his plan to cut property taxes. Americans for Tax Reform launched radio ads in Texas attacking the Bush proposal. According to Norquist, Karl Rove was furious, and he accused him of distortion in a phone call. Eventually, they settled their differences: the state legislature forced Bush to eliminate the new taxes from his plan, and Norquist endorsed it. In 1998, when Bush was thinking about running for the White House as a tax-cutting conservative, Rove invited Norquist to Austin. “Karl has never said it to me,” Norquist recalled, “but I assumed that he was interested in me because I was one of the few people who could stand up and say to the movement, ‘This guy is not a real Bush. He’s adopted. He’s no relation to that jerk who raised your taxes in 1990.’ ”

Norquist and Rove started communicating by fax. Norquist would send a list of ideas to Rove, who would mark the ones he agreed with and send it back. In addition to their mutual interest in getting Bush elected, they shared an obsession with political demographics, in how factors such as immigration, the rise of stock ownership, and the development of exurb communities were affecting political affiliations.

During Bush’s first term, Norquist championed the President’s tax cuts, dismissing suggestions that they would increase the budget deficit and favor the rich. Before last year’s election, Americans for Tax Reform gave a nationwide list of conservative activists to the Bush-Cheney headquarters and acted as an unofficial branch of the campaign. Today, Norquist and Rove communicate by e-mail, and Norquist also speaks regularly with Sara Taylor, the White House’s political director. “People like to say, ‘Oh, Grover and Rove, they are old college pals. They were in the College Republicans together,’ ’’ Norquist said. “Yes, but that’s not the reason we work together. We work together because we have the same political aims. We are trying to do the same things. If Karl Rove left the White House tomorrow, I am sure I would have a good relationship with whoever succeeded him, because I am head of the anti-tax movement. If I were run over by a bus, my successor would have a good relationship with the White House. It is about more than personalities.”

Recently, however, Norquist has differed with the Administration, particularly over Bush’s decision to make Social Security reform his main domestic priority. Norquist supports the privatization plan, but he thinks that the White House blundered politically in believing that it could get legislation passed this year, and in floating several compromise ideas, including significant cuts in future benefits. “The President has put a false step forward in allowing a discussion of future benefit reductions,” Norquist said to me in May. “He went away from the successful strategy of 2000, 2002, and 2004, which was: ‘I will never cut your benefits. I will never raise your taxes. I will make your children rich.’ That was a winning strategy. Right now, you have a President who said he wouldn’t negotiate with himself but who’s busy negotiating with himself.”

In meetings with Bush’s advisers, Norquist has registered his objections. “My argument to them is this,” he said. “What votes did you get in the Senate for personal accounts by making that concession on benefits? None.” Norquist rarely criticizes the White House publicly, and he quickly pointed out that the Bush Administration was making progress in other areas he cares about, such as military-base closures, tort reform, and competitive procurement of government services. However, he didn’t hide the fact that he was markedly less optimistic than he had been in November. “Between now and 2006, judges and Social Security swallow everything,” he said. “We are looking at six to eighteen months of complete gridlock. And if the Republicans don’t do as well as we hope in 2006 we are looking at three years of it.”

The gala dinner for Tom DeLay was held at the Capital Hilton. Norquist had bought five tables, at a total cost of ten thousand dollars, but he was attending only the cocktail hour, which had prompted comments that he was distancing himself from DeLay. Before setting out for the dinner, he insisted to me that he wasn’t, and that, in any case, reporters had misinterpreted his relationship with the Texan. “He and I don’t work together,” Norquist said. “I think it’s because he thinks I’m a Gingrich guy, and he and Newt aren’t close. We don’t communicate. O.K.?” Norquist paused and lowered his voice. “Mind you,” he went on, “in all good conspiracies there is not necessarily any overt communication. A properly run movement operates the way the U.S. Navy communicates with its submarines. It bangs the rock core of the earth. The vibrations go all around, but only the guys in our subs know what they mean.”

Personally, DeLay and Norquist have little in common. DeLay is a devout evangelical Christian who once ran an exterminating company. Norquist, though he tries to hide it, is a cosmopolitan Ivy League intellectual. Still, Norquist thinks that DeLay has been unjustly criticized. “I say to reporters, ‘Can you give me the one-sentence description of what DeLay did wrong?’ Jim Wright took cash from the Teamsters with phony book sales. Rostenkowski”—the Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in the nineteen-eighties and early nineties—“took cash in return for phony stamp sales. These things are wrong. They are clear. What is it that DeLay did? They can stick DeLay and my old friend Jack Abramoff in the same sentence, or the same paragraph, but what is the point? O.K., DeLay goes on a lot of trips. But it is not criminal or dishonest.”

A few dozen protesters were encamped across the street from the Hilton. One had brought along a loudspeaker and a fairground test-your-strength machine. “Step right up and win a free trip paid for by lobbyists,” he bellowed, offering a big hammer to passersby. Norquist arrived with his new wife, Samah, who is tall and slim, with green eyes and long hair. Norquist was a bachelor for many years. Most of his friends gave up on his ever getting married; some of his enemies suggested that he was gay. But in 2001 he met Samah, a Palestinian Muslim who was born in Kuwait and moved to the United States at the age of seventeen. The wedding was held at the Lansdowne resort, near Dulles airport. About two hundred people, among them Newt Gingrich and a belly dancer, attended. “I never thought I’d see Grover on the dance floor,” Fred Smith, the head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank, told me. Peggy Noonan, who was also a guest, sent me this account by e-mail: “It was distinctively Grover in that it was a big jumble—a Christian man marrying a Muslim woman in a ceremony officiated by a rabbi in a hotel in the Virginia countryside. . . . Warm, affectionate, unpretentious. Later I thought that it was like a familial version of the Wednesday group.”

Since the wedding, Samah has been redecorating the town house on Capitol Hill where Norquist has lived for four years, and getting rid of some of his junk. She told me that she had already packed away most of his old political posters, and jettisoned his collections of salt and pepper holders and rolls of toilet paper. Toilet paper? “Yes,” Norquist interjected. “They were mostly from Eastern Europe—Poland, especially—and they had a lot of cool writing on them and stuff.” So far, Norquist added, he had been able to keep his collections of snow globes and airline sick bags.

The cocktail party was full of social conservatives. “We try to stop abortions,” the Reverend Louis P. Sheldon, the chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, said to me. “Grover tries to stop the I.R.S. He’s had more success than we’ve had. Money talks.” After saying hello to some friends, Norquist slipped out to join a private dinner that he was hosting at his house for Michael Oxley, a congressman from Ohio, who is the chairman of the Financial Services Committee. He missed DeLay, and the greeting to the crowd from Cleta Mitchell, a conservative lawyer who helped organize the event: “Welcome to the vast right-wing conspiracy.”

When the speeches began, Dr. Ed Young, DeLay’s pastor from Houston, declared, “I’m proud to be in a room with people who make decisions on the basis of Judeo-Christian principles, and not on the basis of what the latest polls tell them.” Paul Weyrich, the president of the Free Congress Foundation, described DeLay as a “prayerful, decent person of integrity,” and Jesse Helms, speaking on videotape, said, “Tom, hang in there. The conservative movement needs you.” DeLay received a standing ovation. Rather than confronting the charges against him, he reviewed the first ten years of conservative rule, noting that the Republicans had cut income taxes, banned partial-birth abortions, and made America safer. Then he poured scorn on his accusers, saying, “The once great party of Roosevelt and Kennedy has become the party of Howard Dean.”

Finally, Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, delivered a benediction. “Heavenly Father,” he said, “we are here tonight to thank you for our leader, Tom DeLay. We thank you for him, and we want to pray for him and Christine”—DeLay’s wife. “We lift them up before you, and we ask that you put a shield around them. Father, we pray, your own word over them, that no weapon formed against them would prosper. Lord, that every lion tongue would be cast down. And we pray, Lord, that they will come out on the other side of this, servants more usable in your kingdom.”

As Norquist’s “leave us alone” coalition grows, so does the potential for internal conflict. During President Bush’s first term, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath helped prevent any outright breaches. With the country threatened and the economy in trouble, there was little appetite for discord. Lately, though, submerged differences have surfaced, as they were sure to do at some point, since the Republican Party now includes rural gun owners and suburban women, Arab doctors and Jewish foreign-policy hawks, big-business free traders and America First protectionists.

If there was one incident that ruptured the façade of unity it was the bipartisan deal in the Senate to preserve the filibuster, which was reached in May, with John McCain, who is likely to run for President in 2008, taking the lead on the Republican side. “What Republican activists see is that a significant number of our people sold out,” David Keene told me a couple of days afterward. “The ultimate danger point for the Party is a McCain candidacy. If he runs and gets nominated, there will be a third-party conservative candidate, and the Democrats will probably win.”

Norquist was disappointed by the Senate deal, but he didn’t say much publicly. In trying to minimize feuding, he concentrates on areas of agreement, such as tax cuts, tort reform, and bashing the Democrats. He has adopted some positions of the religious right, claiming to be anti-abortion, even though that might seem to contradict his libertarianism, and skeptical about evolution. Still, his laissez-faire views on economics and other issues sometimes create tension.

On immigration, for example, his call for a relaxation of existing laws is opposed by traditionalists like Paul Weyrich and Phyllis Schlafly, the president of the Eagle Forum, who have little enthusiasm for another influx of Hispanic, Caribbean, and Asian immigrants, let alone Arabs and Africans. “Phyllis is very anti-immigration and very anti-free-trade,” Norquist said. “I think Phyllis’s theory is: Foreigners suck.” Another of Norquist’s causes is broadcasting deregulation. Under the auspices of Americans for Tax Reform, he has set up a Media Freedom Project, which lobbies against censorship of the airwaves. Earlier this summer, L. Brent Bozell III, the founder of the conservative Media Research Center, accused him of doing the bidding of NBC, CBS, and Fox. “Mr. Norquist not only doesn’t speak for conservatives on this issue,” Bozell wrote in his syndicated column. “He has no idea what conservatives believe.”

It is hard to imagine that Norquist would enjoy living in a country run by people like Perkins and Bozell, but he is so caught up in partisan strategizing that he seldom stops to consider the question. “When some people see the religious right, they see an aggressive group that is trying to enact Leviticus on the rest of the country,” he said. “What I see is a defensive group that votes against being messed with by other people and the government. The religious right is a parents-rights movement. They want the right to raise their kids in their own way.”

This analysis would be more convincing if conservative evangelicals couched their case in libertarian terms, but they don’t. Instead, they call for the whole United States to return to its pious Christian roots—statements that Norquist dismisses by arguing that the religious leaders are sometimes more intolerant than their flocks. “The Southern Baptists will be happy in George Bush’s America with lower taxes and less regulation,” he insisted. “And everybody will be able to go to the pornographic theatre as they see fit.”

In addition to religious conservatives and gun owners, Norquist reaches out to many groups not usually associated with the Republican Party. In 1998, he co-founded the Islamic Free Market Institute, and he has been credited with helping to get some of America’s six million Muslims behind Bush in the 2000 Presidential election. “When I started out in the Party, nobody was doing Japanese-American relations, nobody was doing Indian relations, and nobody was speaking to Muslims or Orthodox Jews,” he said. Norquist sees conservative ethnic and religious communities as natural elements of the Republican coalition. “On politics, they are the same,” he insisted. “Theologically, they are not. Each one doesn’t think the other is going to Heaven. But what do they want? They want the government to leave them alone, to let them educate their kids, and to not make fun of their faith. All of them want that.”

Norquist’s efforts to woo religious and ethnic groups have sparked criticism from some hard-line neoconservatives, who have accused him of consorting with Muslim groups that provide financial support for terrorists, claiming that some people associated with the Islamic Free Market Institute have links to terrorist groups. Norquist has denounced the charge as outrageous, and in 2003 he banned one of his accusers, Frank Gaffney, who served in the Pentagon during the Reagan Administration, from his Wednesday meeting. Others have suggested that Norquist, in marrying a Muslim, converted to Islam, which isn’t true. “The only way you get thrown out of the meeting is by breaking the rules or by being a racist,” Norquist said. “Frank was a despicable racist, and he’s out of the meeting. We are either a Republican Party that is open to all ethnic groups and all religions, or we die.”

Another group that Norquist has courted is right-leaning gays. Not long ago, I went with him to a meeting of the Virginia branch of the Log Cabin Republicans, where a woman named Laura Sennett, who described herself as a housewife, confronted him about last year’s election, when the Republican Party exploited gay marriage as a wedge issue. “It reminded me of Nazi Germany,” Sennett, who has a gay family member, said. “What was your reaction?” Norquist looked uncomfortable. Instead of answering directly, he predicted that twenty-three states would pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, after which the issue would disappear. Sennett wasn’t satisfied. She pressed Norquist again on what he thought of targeting gays, adding, “It’s bad, right?” At last, he answered her. “Yes, it’s bad,” he said. “Democracies are dangerous. Look what happens in California, where they pick on the richest ten per cent.”

Encounters like this one don’t seem to bother Norquist much. “When you are the governing coalition, you are going to have conflicts—it’s inevitable,” he said when I asked him about fissures within the Republican coalition. “These guys don’t have to sleep together. They don’t have to have dinner together. They don’t even have to live in the same neighborhoods. They just have to show up on the same day and vote for the same party.”

The biggest tribute that has been paid to Norquist is the effort by Democrats to mimic some of his tactics. Since the start of the year, a group of union officials, Hill staffers, academics, journalists, and single-issue activists has been gathering every other Tuesday morning to discuss how to thwart the Bush Administration’s agenda, particularly its Social Security plan.

Norquist pays close attention to what the “other team” is doing. In April, he invited George Soros, the billionaire, philanthropist, and, lately, supporter of Democratic causes, such as America Coming Together and MoveOn.org, to a Wednesday meeting. The room was packed. Soros talked about how his family had survived the Holocaust and how he fled from Hungary to England, where he studied philosophy under Karl Popper and embraced the Open Society before emigrating to America. He added, “Post 9/11, I felt the Open Society was under attack from the Bush Administration’s war on terror, a war that cannot be won if it is fought as a war.”

Norquist asked Soros how much he had spent trying to defeat President Bush. About twenty-seven million dollars, Soros replied. Other questions followed, many of them hostile, about Iraq, Social Security, the role of free markets, and campaign-finance reform. Soros answered them all. Speaking in a thick Hungarian accent, he said that he regarded himself as a moderate Republican, “but moderate Republicans have been practically exterminated in recent years”—a comment that prompted loud cheers. He called the war in Iraq unjustified and counterproductive. Finally, he said he hoped that the Democrats would win the next election and that the Republicans would then return to the center. People looked at him as if he had endorsed infanticide.

After the meeting, Norquist explained why he had invited Soros. “I want to sit him down with some folks on the right who are serious about civil rights and see if there is any common ground. I think he might be interested, because giving money to the A.C.L.U. doesn’t mean squat anymore. It can’t move any votes on the Hill.” In recent months, Norquist has defied the White House by joining a variety of libertarian groups, including the A.C.L.U., in campaigning to get parts of the Patriot Act reformed, particularly the “sneak and peek” clauses that allow the government to examine people’s financial, medical, and library records. Why not get Soros to spend some money to support these efforts? Surely he would be interested in getting a return on his political investments.

The one thing that surprised Norquist about Soros’s appearance, he told me later, was the revelation that Soros had spent only twenty-seven million dollars during last year’s election. “That is so goofy,” Norquist said. “The guy is worth, what, seven billion dollars, and he tried to buy the Presidency on the cheap. He should have been in for two and a half billion dollars, for crying out loud. Twenty-seven million dollars—that should have been ante money. What were they thinking?”

Norquist is an expert on the murky area where money and politics intersect. For years, he has helped funnel financial contributions from corporations and rich individuals to Republican candidates and causes, often skirting the campaign-finance laws in the process. Following the 1996 elections, Senator Carl Levin, of Michigan, accused Americans for Tax Reform of laundering roughly five million dollars for the Republican National Committee. Shortly thereafter, state officials in Oregon uncovered a scheme in which wealthy Oregonians sent large sums of money to Americans for Tax Reform, which passed them on to an organization called Oregon Taxpayers United, hiding the identity of the donors. Neither case led to any legal action against Norquist.

In recent years, he has also been involved in the K-Street Project, an audacious attempt by Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, including Tom DeLay and Senator Rick Santorum, of Pennsylvania, to turn the busy thoroughfare where many corporate influence peddlers have their offices into an affiliate of the Republican Party. Republicans have warned lobbying firms not to hire any Democrats or contribute to Democratic causes if they wish to influence legislation. In 1999, Americans for Tax Reform began posting on its Web site information about which candidates and parties individual lobbyists have made contributions to, and Norquist started echoing the DeLay-Santorum line, calling for even the secretaries on K Street to be Republicans.

To a large extent, the K-Street Project has succeeded. Many corporations that used to employ lobbyists from both parties in equal numbers now hire mostly Republicans. Citigroup, for example, has only one Democrat on its congressional lobbying staff. Republicans have come to hold key positions in many of the major trade groups, such as the Securities Industry Association and Pharma, which represents big drug companies.

Until 1999, Norquist himself lobbied Congress and the executive branch on behalf of business interests. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, he was either a lobbyist or a consultant for Microsoft, Seagram, the Distilled Spirits Council, and the Interactive Gaming Council. He also registered as a lobbyist for unita and for the Seychelles, whose leader, France Albert Rene, was a self-styled leftist. Today, Norquist is no longer officially a lobbyist. He receives a salary of nearly a hundred and seventy thousand dollars, which is modest by the standards of corporate lobbyists, but Americans for Tax Reform, which has a budget of about five million dollars a year, still receives a lot of cash from corporations that stand to benefit from the policies it advocates.

Norquist has always denied pushing legislation in order to attract financial contributions. Recently, however, his motivations have been called into question because of his relationship with Jack Abramoff, whose reputation has been destroyed by revelations that while he was receiving millions of dollars from several Indian tribes, he was privately referring to Indians as “monkeys,” “mofos,” and “troglodytes.”

Last November, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which is investigating Abramoff’s lobbying activities on behalf of the Indian tribes, wrote to Americans for Tax Reform, asking for a long list of documents, including financial records. For years, Norquist has been insisting that Indian territory be exempt from federal taxation, a policy that greatly benefits the tribes that operate casinos there. Meanwhile, it is now clear, Indian tribes have been making generous donations to Americans for Tax Reform, and also, in some cases, using it as a conduit to other conservative groups.

In June, the Indian Affairs Committee released a batch of e-mails detailing how large sums of money appear to have gone from Abramoff’s Indian clients to Americans for Tax Reform, and then on to another Republican consultant, Ralph Reed, who is the former head of the Christian Coalition. The electronic trail begins on November 12, 1998, shortly after the midterm election, when Reed writes to Abramoff, “Hey, now that I’m done with electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts! I’m counting on you to help me with some contacts. Have you talked to Grover since the Newt development.” Gingrich had just resigned as Speaker of the House. “I’m afraid he took a hit on the consulting side with that since so much of it was Newt maintenance but I hope I’m wrong.”

By early 1999, Reed’s lobbying firm, Century Strategies, was helping Christian groups in Alabama fight legislation that would create a statewide lottery and permit video poker in certain locations. Abramoff’s client in neighboring Mississippi, the Choctaw tribe, fearing potential competition, decided to donate more than a million dollars to Reed’s campaign, which included costly radio and television spots, but the tribe was hindered by the fact that the Christian groups wouldn’t accept casino money. On September 24, 1999, Abramoff wrote a note to himself: “Call Ralph re Grover doing pass through.” Eleven days later, he wrote, “Grover and Ralph, we need a check to Ralph by Wednesday.”

At the start of 2000, the casino battle intensified. Reed needed more cash, and the Choctaws agreed to supply some. After discussing several options, Reed and Abramoff again decided to send the money via Norquist, but this time, apparently, he kept some of it for Americans for Tax Reform. “I need to give Grover something for helping, so the first transfer will be a bit lighter,” Abramoff wrote to Reed on February 7, 2000.

Ten days later, Abramoff sent another e-mail to Reed: “ATR will be sending a second $300K today. How much more do we need? We can’t lose this.” Once again, Americans for Tax Reform apparently took a cut of the money, prompting Abramoff to write to himself a few days later: “Grover kept another $25K!”

The committee also released correspondence relating to a meeting that Norquist helped organize in May, 2001, at which some of Abramoff’s Indian clients met with President Bush. On April 5th, Abramoff wrote to Norquist, “Here’s the first of the checks for the tax event at the White House. I’ll have another $25K shortly.” Sixteen months later, on August 12, 2002, Abramoff wrote to an official with the Saginaw Chippewas, another of his client tribes, “Last year Grover set a meeting for certain select tribal leaders (Coushatta and Chitimach were the only ones) and the speakers of the house of several legislatures to meet with the President in a small meeting for photos, etc. The tribes paid for the event (total cost was $100K for the entire thing, and each tribe put in $50K). Grover has asked me to line up a few tribes to do so again.”

Norquist claims that Abramoff’s e-mails are misleading and inaccurate. The two payments of twenty-five thousand dollars that Americans for Tax Reform received from the Choctaws in early 2000 were perfectly legitimate and not in any way unusual, he says, since the tribe had long been supportive of the organization’s activities—a point confirmed by a Choctaw representative, who told the Indian Affairs Committee that her tribe “routinely made contributions” to Americans for Tax Reform. As for the meetings in the White House, Norquist insists they were part of an existing program to reward local leaders and legislators who supported the Bush Administration’s agenda, and not part of some cash-for-access scheme. “No one was invited to Washington or to meet the President as the result of a contribution. Nor did A.T.R. ask anyone for a contribution promising anything or any meeting,” Norquist said. “Abramoff’s e-mail is just wrong.”

So far, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that Norquist has broken the law. Americans for Tax Reform, since it’s what is known in Washington as a 501c(4) advocacy group, is entitled to make financial donations to practically any cause it chooses, regardless of where the money originated. “You can say that the laws should be changed, but that is an entirely different matter,” Newt Gingrich told me. “You can’t criticize people for doing things that are entirely legal. I know parts of the left would like to use this to bring Grover down, but that is not going to happen.”

Still, Norquist is trapped between a widening criminal investigation into Abramoff’s activities, an inquisitive congressional committee, and an energized press—a deadly triangle that many once prominent Washington figures have disappeared into. On Capitol Hill, there is discussion about what John McCain, the main force behind the Abramoff investigation, will do next. A senior Democratic staffer I spoke with speculated that McCain could be “sitting on a treasure trove of e-mails that would do in Grover” but which he hasn’t released because he is “leveraging the information to get Reed to grovel and Grover to help his 2008 primary.” McCain, for his part, has said that his only interest is in uncovering wrongdoing and protecting Indian tribes from future ripoffs.

Norquist blames McCain for much of his trouble. In the fall of 1999, when McCain looked as if he might win the Republican nomination for the Presidency, Norquist, Ralph Reed, and other conservative activists organized press conferences in New Hampshire and South Carolina to attack the Senator’s work on campaign-finance reform. These attacks coincided with the spread of rumors questioning McCain’s mental health and his fitness for the White House. McCain’s support ebbed, and he lost South Carolina to George W. Bush. Since then, he and Norquist have been bitter enemies.

“McCain was running as de Gaulle,” Norquist recalled. “He said, ‘Vote for me. I will lead you.’ That is Caesarism. That is completely unacceptable. Add to that, McCain is completely unstable. He throws things. He screams at people. Ask anybody on his staff and they will tell you. Also, remember, McCain is Keating Five. He is the one who had to adopt campaign-finance reform so it wouldn’t say on his tombstone that he was part of a major congressional scandal, the S. & L. scandal.” If Norquist was worried about McCain and his colleagues on the Indian Affairs Committee, he wasn’t showing it. “They are going to go after me, saying, ‘Grover and Jack, they are icky,’ ” he said. “But that’s all right.” McCain might “whine a lot, but we can deal with that.”

McCain declined to comment on Norquist’s remarks, but his chief of staff, Mark Salter, said, in a statement, “I doubt the Senator is much troubled by Mr. Norquist’s opinion of him. On the contrary, he is pleased that he has never had an association with Mr. Norquist and prefers that it stay that way.” Salter also noted, “Senator McCain is not trying to tarnish Grover Norquist’s reputation by tying him to Jack Abramoff. By his own admission, Grover couldn’t be any closer to Abramoff if they moved to Massachussetts and got married.”

The biggest threat that Norquist faces may not be a legal one. For years, he has traded on the fact that other conservative activists looked upon him as an incorruptible outsider. Now his reputation is being attacked even by fellow-conservatives. Last month, The Weekly Standard, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, described Norquist and Reed as “symbols of how one-time anti-Washington political insurgents traded in their idealism for gobs of corporate cash.”

As the scandal plays out, Norquist is keeping as busy as ever. A couple of weeks ago, I drove with him to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he attended a regular meeting of local conservative activists. On the way, he talked about the coming battle over the Supreme Court. Immediately after Sandra Day O’Connor resigned, a number of leading conservatives angered President Bush by warning him not to nominate Alberto R. Gonzales, the Attorney General, because they feared that he, like David Souter, who was nominated by Bush’s father, would turn out to be a moderate justice. Norquist backed the White House, telling the dissidents to pipe down.

“One of the things that the President learned from his father and Ronald Reagan was don’t raise taxes,” Norquist said. “The other was don’t screw up Supreme Court appointments. I believe that, as far as is humanly possible, he is going to pick a judge who is like Scalia and Thomas. I trust him on that because he saw what happened when Bush senior picked the wrong judge. Also, if you are not going to get Social Security reform, you are not going to get fundamental tax reform, and you are not going to turn the Middle East into Switzerland, then the thing that people will write about you in fifty years is that the judicial appointments you made really shifted things.”

Last week, when President Bush nominated John G. Roberts, a fifty-year-old judge on the federal appeals court, and a member of the Federalist Society, Norquist was elated. “He appears to be a solid person who is at the center of the ‘leave us alone’ coalition on judicial issues,” he said. “This is tremendous progress for conservatives in the legal community.” When Tim Goeglein presented the White House’s case for Roberts at the Wednesday meeting, nobody stood up to challenge him. “That’s a pretty good indication that people are happy with the nomination,” Norquist said.

Still, even if Roberts gets confirmed fairly easily, which is what many Washington insiders expect to happen, the conservative campaign to take control of the high court will continue. “The big fight—the Bork-style battle—comes when Ginsberg, Souter, or Stevens steps aside,” Norquist said. “That is when the other side will make a stand, and our side will push for victory.”

Norquist prides himself on taking the long view and accepting occasional setbacks. On Social Security, for example, he now thinks that it might take until after the election of 2008, or even 2010, for the Bush agenda to triumph, but he sees reform as inevitable, and he predicts that the private savings accounts will ultimately become known as “W” accounts. “Ronald Reagan won the Cold War in 1991—three years after he left office,” he said. “You don’t have to be there physically to get the credit.”

One evening recently, Norquist attended a dinner for the New York State Conservative Party at the New York Sheraton at which he was praised by Governor Pataki. Partly owing to Norquist’s efforts, Pataki told the crowd, even liberal New York Republicans now thought twice before raising taxes. Karl Rove was the event’s honoree. He caused some controversy by saying that after September 11th some liberals and Democrats wanted to offer “therapy” to the attackers. But most of his speech was taken up with a triumphalist analysis of political realignment. Harking back to 1964, when Barry Goldwater was defeated in a landslide and “we were relegated to the political wilderness,” Rove claimed that conservatism was now “the guiding philosophy in the White House, the Senate, the House, in twenty-eight governorships, and the majority of state legislatures.”

After the dinner and a photograph with Rove, Norquist walked uptown, to the Time Warner Center, where several hundred people had gathered to honor Milton Friedman, the free-market economist, who is ninety-two. The fact that New York could support two such benefits in one night, Norquist said, testified to Rove’s point about the strength of the conservative movement. Then, as usual, he ran into somebody he knew. “How’s it going?” the woman asked him. Norquist didn’t hesitate. “We’re winning,” he replied. ♦

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